


Everything You Are

by abbichicken



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M, Mansion Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-15
Updated: 2011-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-21 10:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik suspects Hank is getting up to things of which he does not approve in the lab, thus pays him a visit to deliver what he thinks is sage advice. Sharp learning curves ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything You Are

Hank is having a good afternoon. Having made such a breakthrough with his strength and speed earlier in the day, he's feeling good about the advances he's making in the lab.

When the door opens, then closes, he assumes it's Raven, come for another progress update.

"I think I've got something!" he says, without even looking up.

"How interesting," Erik replies, tone suggesting that whatever it is very much not of interest to him at all.

Hank starts a little. "Erik. Er, hi?"

Erik has never been in here before, indeed, Hank realises, he's barely ever even spoken to him before.

"I have a problem."

Hank frowns. "You think that it's something I can help with?"

"You misunderstand me. I have a problem with you."

Hank goldfishes, and sets aside the slides he was working with.

Erik rolls his eyes. "I think that you are stirring things that should be left well alone."

"You mean..."

"Raven, yes. I saw you, there, playing her for her samples."

"It wasn't like..."

"Don't argue."

Hank shuts his mouth, obediantly.

Erik makes a further mental stroke against him for just that, deciding that such obedience only proves that he is right to be suspicious of Hank's motives.

"I understand that you think that life hasn't treated you well, I'm sure that it cuts you to the bone when people make fun of your feet, and I know that you feel you're doomed to spend your life lying and pretending you're something you're not. But you need to understand that you do not have the right to drag others into your poisonous mindset. Especially not those who've been taught that hiding is the only way they'll ever make it in this world."

Without even trying to hide his confusion, Hank replies only, "I don't understand."

"I know that you understand what I said, because I know that you're damn clever, Hank, so don't play games with me. Perhaps what you mean is, you don't understand why I'm saying it. Let's try again. You're special. Raven's special. We're all fucking special. None of us need to hide it, and we certainly don't need to you go splicing and dicing at our DNA in an attempt to make us more palatable to those who would put bullets in our backs at best, and hold us in a zoo at the worst."

Erik paces around the table, picking up things, putting them down, no point, not even curious, simply...interfering.

"By all means, study yourself. Look at what you are, forget everything you've told yourself. Make more of yourself; don't paint it over."

"It's...it's easy for you. You don't have anything...it doesn't show, your power, you don't have to hide."

"I have nothing to hide," Erik replies, voice thin as fine wiring, "but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to see."

Erik unzips his jacket with as much threat in the motion as if he were raising the barrel of a gun. Hank frowns, as he slowly, slowly, removes it, folds it, and places it on the work surface. Then, slower still, without ever looking up, he folds the cuff of his left sleeve back on itself, over, over, and over. He extends his forearm, and only as he sees the numbers pinned into the pale, veined flesh, does Hank understand at least a little of what he's referring to.

"There are many things about me," Erik continues, at last, "for which lesser men have judged me, for which others would judge me, for which, for as long as they're allowed to, humans will judge me. Some are visible, some aren't. I could show you a few things, Hank. Quite a few things, for which you, too, would judge me. My doing this would prove to us both that in your narrow copycat view of society - that it will have you just the way you are if you could only change that one little thing about you, if your feet could just pretend to be a little more _homo sapiens_ \- that you have become as rotten and detached from the morals you think you hold as the men who..." Erik tails off a little, seeing Hank's age reflected in the way that he is crumpling a little, folding, weak and with so much to learn. "No, that would be too far. But you're on your way, Hank. You're on your way to a place I promise you you do not want to go."

Hank is flushed with embarrassment, and more than a shot of fear, as Erik's calmness is of the sort you only feel right before the thunder breaks, and the air in the lab is dry and chill and thin; he feels as if he's choking on a shame he never intended to feel.

"Finally, I would like you to know, that to be what we are, to be who we are, is not, and should never be easy. Look how peripheral your accomplishments are, so far."

"But I -"

"Built a flying machine? Congratulations. Have an elementary grasp of genetics? Marvellous. A mutant-identification machine? Be very, very careful. Perhaps you're used to your successes seeming so grand, measured against the human scale, but really, with your gifts, you should be so much braver. Imagine what you might design. Imagine what you could discover. Imagine how, if you continue in this quest to merge, to bond with the humans, your knowledge will be used against us. Against you. Think about that word, Hank. Used. It's all you'll ever be, if you keep trying to force yourself into a position you were never meant to fill."

"I'm sorry you think so little of me," Hank says, passive-aggressive to the nth degree.

Erik simply walks away, not honouring such a response with anything at all.

Hank doesn't actually say, _wait_ , but Erik feels the word catch in the boy's throat as keen as if it were a tap at his shoulder. He pauses, and turns on his heel.

Taking a breath too deep for normal behaviour, Hank walks - too quickly, marches - up to Erik, and looks him smart in the eye. Erik is, after all this time with Charles, not so used to being looked in the eye when standing, much less being even a little looked down upon, so he's just slightly off guard when, with less than any warning, Hank nips forward and kisses him so awkwardly, so hard on the lips that it hurts like a bite.

Erik, experiencing a warmth of _I thought as much_ and _I am fascinated that you think this is the appropriate way to impart this information_ , doesn't skip a beat of the kiss, sudden as it is, instead consolidating it, his hand sliding immediately at the back of Hank's head, fingers snaking into his hair, yanking it tight, his other arm winding around Hank's waist pulling him ohtooclose, overwhelming him with strength and decisiveness, whilst being so much, more than Hank could have asked for, when asking a question he didn't know he so desperately needed the answer to. His glasses are pressed hard into their faces, as Erik mauls his lips apart, pushing the tastes of age and whisky and severity into his mouth.

Beneath Hank's slender frame, Erik can feel that there is something more there, that there is a streak in Hank's bloodstream that is dying to force itself through the cells, that there is a potential here which is being so much less than realised. He feels it in the way that Hank's body wants him, knows from the way this doesn't falter, from the way Hank grabs him back that Hank wishes he had the strength and the guts to throw him down across the tables - to try to, at least - and try to make this so much more, but his body language presents all the nerves and the crushing lack of self-belief that mean this will not happen, not now.

After time that feels twice as long it was, time enough for Hank's lips to have coloured and Erik's anger to have dissipated, it is Erik who pushes them apart, abruptly.

Hank struggles to know how to stand and face him, caught between turning away, buckling into a hunch of overtly conscious contemplation, and standing up to however this ends, just as he failed to stand up to its beginning.

He is surprised to see Erik smiling - at least, his thin, asymmetric twist of the lips that passes between smiling and caring, rather than reflecting actual amusement.

With a nod, and the smile curling further, Erik says, very deliberately, "Never be afraid of anything - _everything_ \- that you are. And never be afraid to ask for, nor to take, what it is that you need."

But even as Hank is smiling back, unable to resist, flattered embarrassment taking its toll on his stance, Erik has _switch_ gone back to all he was before, and is there, in his face, the other way around, no kiss, only a warning.

"If I see you, if I hear you, if I _sense_ you - Charles may be a telepath, but I don't need to see into a mind like yours to know what you're up to - trying to coerce others away from their gifts, suggesting that we should strive to be more human, if I find you taking any of them aside and trying to treat them with whatever you think you're making...you will regret it. You're not the only person here who knows how to toy with mutations. But _I_ am the only person here who has been a test subject. A test subject for men playing far above your game, at that. Don't abuse your knowledge, your science. Or I will find a way to teach you the lessons that I was taught about what 'science' can do for us mutants. And I'll make sure that those lessons hurt you just as much as they did me."

Hank only nods, drained, empty, mouth dry and extremities cold; where just moments before he was flooded with burning and aliveness, he might drop stone-cold to the floor now.

Taking up his jacket, with no look back, no parting shot, Erik leaves the lab, the door closing definitively behind him.

Hank is drawn and quartered, his learnt self fighting his natural self for coherence, anger rising in spasms, forced down again by the surging need to panic.

He grips the edge of the table, trying to force himself back into what he was doing. Fuck Erik, he thinks. Fuck him. His grip grows tighter as he tries to douse the thought of the way in which he has also let slide to Erik that that is exactly what another, terrible, conflicted part of him would so very much like to do.


End file.
